Thursday, September 01, 2005

Modern Art?

Man has always painted. We find paintings that cavemen made on their caves. They drew the animals they hunted.

It was believed to be a good omen. Today, millennia later, we learn interesting facts about their life from their paintings. Their paintings are crude, but have a semblance to the world they lived in.

As man matured, his paintings grew more and more intricate. He painted ceremonies and rituals. He made portraits of great kings and scenes of great wars. He painted beautiful women and majestic buildings. He migrated from painting on walls to painting on wood, papyrus, canvas and paper. What was common among all these paintings was that they were a picture of the world that the painters lived in, or were a picture of the ideal world that the painters dreamt of.

We have always stood in awe of some paintings. People from around the world flock to Paris to see the Mona Lisa. They may not appreciate the intricacies of the painting, but they find it rewarding to stand in its presence for but one fleeting moment. In the same age as the Mona Lisa, however, there developed a new form of Art - Modern Art. Paintings of abstract objects, thrown together in a jumble, supposedly meant to express some emotion that the painter felt. In my opinion, the only emotion that a painter could have been feeling while painting such pictures would be "chaos" or a supreme confidence that he could pass that painting off as a piece of art. Given the apparent genius of these painters, I increasingly feel that it is this second emotion that the painters felt. Modern Art is nothing but a mockery of the supposed understanding of "art" that people possess. Even as art connoisseurs ooh and aah in ecstacy as they "study" one of these pieces, the master-minds who created them laugh their heads off in their graves. It has been a trick that they tried and they successfully pulled it off. Little would they have guessed that their hoax would run long after they left.

[This painting stands framed in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York]

[This picture was clicked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York]